


The Stone Blade

by ahimsabitches



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Blood, Character Death, F/M, Gore, Warning: Immortan Joe, implied non con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 17:00:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5878618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe hasn't tamed his Shewolf as well as he'd thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stone Blade

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the warnings!
> 
> PS I know my anatomy is off, ha. Suspension of disbelief is a beautiful thing!!

When Joe's breath settles into the steady rhythm of sleep and her own heart no longer roars blood through her ears, she can hear it: the relentless ticking of a clock she has wound and set herself. The deathwatch.

It’s gotten louder in the last few days.

She rests a hand on her growing belly, then experimentally pokes at her teat, pulsing a dull, thudding pain through her. Her face briefly contracts in pain. He’d bitten hard. 

The deathwatch ticks, a sound with no place or origin. It is in the walls, the bed, the table…in him.

She rolls off the bed slowly, listening to his breath change. Three hundred days after her short but vicious rebellion has cooled into quiet pliancy, he is still wary. The pup gushing out of her three hundred days ago, both female and dead, finished the work her twins had begun in their dying. An unbridgeable gulf was riven between husband and wife, and they pace its banks now, vigilant for signs of a crack in the fragile, trembling peace between them.

The deathwatch ticks loud in her ears as she slips downstairs on bare feet.

In the latrine, in the empty tank of the toilet, she has hidden a blade.

She lifts the lid off the tank, careful not to scrape it into a grinding sound. She settles the lid into the crook of her left arm and reaches into the empty tank with her right. The blade is there, nestled among pipes and plugs. She lets out the breath she didn’t know she held.

The blade isn’t metal. It is chipped stone, a primitive elongated teardrop shape she’d hewn herself from a flat flake of the cave wall. She found the flake shortly after her dead girlpup. It lay unobtrusively on the ground in the spare bedroom. It had been a thick, irregular piece of stone then, with one wickedly sharp edge that had drawn blood when she’d accidentally slid the meat of her hand along it.

She’d stood staring at the blood in her hand, eyes wide and heart thudding as a great wave of dawning realization slammed through her.

That night, after she’d begun shaping the stone by chipping away at its rough edges with another stone, the deathwatch had begun to tick in the walls. It was neither comforting nor frightening. It slid beneath her consciousness like sliding, tired and drowsy, under the covers after a hard day.

She pulls something else out of the toilet: a roll of woven medical tape, ancient and yellowed but still sticky. She gently places the lid of the toilet down. Slowly, avoiding sound, she pulls a length from the roll and bites it off. She sticks the stone blade to the middle of the strip and then places the blade flat against the small of her back. It nestles in the dip there as if it’s made for it. She presses the ends of the tape down against her skin, keeping it in place. The baby kicks for the first time as she replaces the roll in the tank and replaces the lid. She pours water down the toilet from the earthen jug on the shelf, making sure the noise will carry.

She knows she will not have time to give the alpha's blessing when the time comes, so she gives it now, in the half-language with which she was born, of signs and chirrs and grunts: _This packmate's time has come. I bless this packmate for a swift and sure journey to wherever his soul may rest. I bless this packmate's body to return to the earth and nourish us. I bless this pack for a warrior lost, a set of feet that will never again mark the sand, a voice that will never again be joined in the pack’s song. I bless the sand and the desert and the sky for their mercy in allowing us to live._

She raises her head and purses her lips in silent mimicry of a howl. 

She must be careful now. Joe will be marking her even if his back is turned and his eyes are closed. They had been together over a thousand days; he had grown to know the rhythms of her steps and breaths as she’d grown from devotion to bitterness to rebellion to dull tolerance. On ghost-quiet feet she heads back up the stairs to the luxurious suite, to Joe. He lies where she’d left him: facing away from her on his side. The point of the blade pokes her spine as she crawls into bed, hand on her belly. The baby kicks again, responding to the sudden uptick in her heartbeat.

He rumbles half-words, rolls over, drops a heavy hand on her belly. Feels the baby move in her. Suddenly he is awake and vulturing over her, his sour breath hot on her skin. She lies on her back, the cold stone of the blade slowly warming to her heat.

The deathwatch ticks loud in him.

After a while he sleeps again, facing her this time, hand on her belly. He begins to snore. She shakes him, murmuring. He rolls heavily onto his back.

Her heart, pounding like a triphammer, drowns out the sound of the deathwatch. After his breathing settles again, she worms her arm behind her, careful not to move or jostle too much, and picks the tape off her skin piece by tiny piece.

It is _aeons_ later and the blade is free, resting on the bed a bare millimeter below her back, arched slightly to avoid sticking the tape to her again. Breathlessly, most of her effort concentrated on keeping her fluttering lungs and jittering heart in a steady rhythm, she pulls the blade out from under her and folds the tape down to create a thin makeshift grip.

He snores lightly. The deathwatch, thuddingly loud now, hammers at the back of her mind, pulling her forward despite icy terror clotting her nerves. She will not think about what will happen if the blade slips, if he wakes. Will not. Cannot.

The stone is warm in her hand. It carries divots from where flakes chipped away. The double edge is uneven but brutally sharp. The point is lethal. It is roughly nine inches, a bit less, from tip to butt. Long enough to reach the parts of Joe nothing and no one but his own sickness has reached in all the days of his life.

The baby moves. The deathwatch booms. She rolls toward her husband, moaning softly, feigning drowsy sleep, the wobbly blade comfortable in her hand.

She slides it up through the softness of his chin, angled slightly back to find the hole in the base of his skull. There is a soft _hk_ sound in his throat as the blade hits either the thick rope of nerves coming from that hole or the bottom of his brain. He jerks spasmodically, his hand brushing her bruised teat in a pitiful, impotent mockery of the grip he had on her an hour before. Blood leaks down the blade onto her hand and out of the corners of his mouth. It is too dark to see his eyes.

After a time, the deathwatch stops.

There is no triumph. There is no relief. She sighs, a long, low sound of bone-deep exhaustion.

The hand gripping the blade is welded there, but the arm connected to it is burning and heavy. Slowly, imagining she can hear the bones creak, she uncurls her fingers from the chipped stone blade. It stays where it's put. She lets her arm fall. Sleep crashes through her and she curls up against Joe's cooling body and tips into unconsciousness.

It is still dark when she wakes, and Joe is cold. Blood has flowed in three thick threads down his bare chest to the bed, puddling between them. There is a smeared slick of it on her arm when she rises.

She sighs again. There is work to do.

Under Miss Giddy's bed there is a red-and-white box. Inside the box there is a sharper blade, a tiny thing only as long as her finger. She pads into the History Woman's room and, with silent smoothness born of long familiarity, opens the trunk at the foot of her bed, removes the box, closes the trunk again.

Neither blade is sufficient for the two things she must do, but she must do them anyway.

With the smaller blade, she slices a long, clean cut from the dip of his collarbone to his solar plexus, for which she has to feel. There is too much fat on him. Hopefully the sickness will have made his bones soft, else the next step will be long and hard. She rests the tiny blade on Joe's thigh.

Grateful again for the darkness to shield his eyes from her, she grips the stone blade, tacky now with half-dried blood, and pulls it out of Joe's chin with a quiet _schluk_. She should rinse it, but water will make the blade slick again and the task at hand requires precision.

Especially in the dark.

She would not turn on the light, though; she dare not.

Blood has already pooled at the bottom of him, so there is not much to leak out from the long cut she's made. A single narrow track winds down his side and touches her knee as she works. It splits and flattens around the curve of her knee, as if embracing it. 

With economical movements, she punches a perforation into the broad middle bone of Joe's ribcage with the point of the stone blade. The blade does better than she thought it would. That, or Joe's bones are weaker than she thought. The perforation needs only a few more punches before she drives the blade into the middle, deeper, and twists. The familiar _crrrk_ of bone giving way dumps an unexplainable bucket of ice water over her, and she pauses, gooseflesh breaking out on her arms, raising the hair on her neck, and for an instant Joe stirs in the darkness, rumbling thickly through a bloodslicked throat.

Suddenly she wants the light on.  _Must_ have it on, or Joe's grinding, gravelly voice, as if he were already filling with desert sand, will drive her mad. She jerks, her breath coming in hitching gasps. Her hands curl into fists, nails biting one palm and the stone blade biting the other. Her blood, freshly drawn, mixes with his, old and stale, on the blade. She whips her head violently, shaking Joe out.

Steadied after a time, she opens her eyes to darkness dashed with streaks of moonlight in the shape of Joe's body. Hooking her hands into either side of the crack she's made in his ribcage, she pulls. The bones come apart with disturbing ease and a soft purring sound. She grasps the small blade with one hand as the other plunges into Joe's chest, feeling for his heart. She gently severs the thick tubes of his arteries and pulls the slimy, soft-firm lump from him.

It sits there in her hands, still and cool, limned in moonlight whiter than his bones. 

There is no other alpha to give it to. No one else she'd want to give it to. It is a sick heart from a sick body. A sick heart that beat sick blood through a sick brain to feed a sick mind.

Morning-kind eyes. Her name, spoken in a deep, sleepy drawl. Strong hands, roving over her body with as much gentleness as their owner could muster. Pleasure, beyond anything she'd thought possible. Three pups. And behind them, this heart.

Her fingers slowly close over the heart. Blood drips, then spurts out of the holes at one end, wetting her lap.

She hurls herself off the bed and hurls the heart away from her with all her might. 

 _Thunk!_ It hits the window-wall, bounces off. _Plup_ , lands on the floor below.

She stares at the smudged black spot where it hit, eyes wide and wild, teeth bared, chest heaving. A scream builds hot and electric in the space between her lungs, but she clenches her fists and her jaw and contains it, heaving calming breaths.

After a while, she returns to the bed and the body, wiping stinging tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. In the morning, Miss Giddy would find streaked smudges of maroon on the sleeping girl's face and would know it is not her blood.

Face blank in the darkness, she tips Joe's head back to expose his wattled, fleshy neck. The stab that killed him opens like an eye, black and baleful. An inch below it, she slices a long cut from one curve of jaw to the other with the small blade. She hopes the stone blade will be sharp enough to cut through his vertebrae. She rests the small blade on his thigh again and reaches for the stone blade, but her hands brush the sheets. She glances down but it is still dark. She presses her hand to the bed, feeling around her for the stone blade. Brows crinkling, she shifts aside, runs her hands along the bed in a wider arc. Nothing. She scoots her hands under the body’s sagging, doughy flesh. Nothing.

 _Where_ is _it_

... _oh_

She sinks her hand into Joe’s open chest and feels its sharp hard flatness settled in the empty space she left when she cut out his heart. She makes a strangled sound in her throat, the corners of her lips pulling back in what could have either been a grin or a snarl.

As she saws through the flesh and cartilage and tendon of his neck, her mind idles on thoughts of the next days. Who would take over the Citadel? Alpha is not a title anyone here deserves. Will she, as the one who killed him, succeed him? The thought thrills her and frightens her.

Soon, the only thing holding Joe's head on his shoulders is the tower of bone that is his spine. She feels along the ridged surface of the bone to find the gap, padded with a gelatinous pocket of fluid. She wedges the point of the stone blade between vertebrae, bursting the pocket of padding. Tapping and twisting the blade, she finally cracks apart the bones and makes quick work of the cord of sinew inside. 

She hoists the head in both hands. It is _heavy_. Hair frames it in a crazed, blood-flecked halo. She turns the head to the moonlight and looks at its eyes.

They are filmed by death and moonlight, blank and bloodshot and staring. Neither morningblue or murderblack. They are the no-color of goneness. She grits her teeth against the urge to throw this thing against the window too. The mouth gapes in a pitiful, impotent mockery of the warscream mask hooked over a chair downstairs.

Pain, she remembers. Unreasoning fury. Her name, bellowed in a grating, mechanical roar. Hands, meaty and fisted, pummeling her and the only other woman she'd seen here. The other woman had died giving birth to her first pup. And behind that death, this head.  She bares her fangs at the head, growls softly. 

She rises from the bed, carrying Joe's head by a hank of hair, and pads downstairs. She places the head on the floor in front of the impluvium, facing Miss Giddy's bedroom. A small smile flits across her lips as she sinks into the water. She scrubs the blood off, forgetting her face. She shakes to dry herself and creeps into her bedroom. She sleeps dreamlessly.

She does not wake at Miss Giddy’s involuntary squeal when she finds the head. She wakes when Miss Giddy shakes her shoulder. Miss Giddy's face, moon-pale and huge, swims into her vision. She is still so very tired. Her eyes close again. Miss Giddy grabs her face and shakes her. She swats weakly at the woman's bony grip.

 _Dira what did you do what did you_ do

“Won’t come back,” she murmurs, sleepdrunk. “Don’ worry. He won’t come back.”

Miss Giddy leaves her. Instantly she drops back into sleep.

Waking is quicker this time, but not less grudging. She moans, rolls away from Miss Giddy’s insistent hand. _Child wake_ up  _Imperators will be here soon they're going to be_ looking _for him,_ Miss Giddy hisses, digging her nails into Dira’s shoulder. She heaves herself upright, into Miss Giddy’s wide, worried eyes.

But there is the capering light of joy in them too, guarded but present.  Her wrinkled, thin mouth twitches as if yearning to grin. The History Woman chatters, the words unimportant. Questions. Worries. Plans. Backup plans. None of it matters, because the deathwatch is quiet.

She oils off the bed, stretching luxuriously. The baby kicks her guts, pausing her momentarily and lifting a grimace-grin to her lips. It will be strong and healthy. She steps out into the common room as the great steel door begins to clank open. Her eyes light on the head, squatting drunkenly, greenly, at the end of an ooze of maroon blood like a hairy snail. The floor dips slightly down toward the impluvium and the last of Joe’s blood leaked down the slope during the night. Without stopping or looking at it on her way to the door, she bends down and grabs the head by a fistful of frizzy bloodstained hair.

Chin high, shoulders square, chest out, jaw jutted, she dares whoever will step through the door to challenge her.


End file.
